This is what the war on drugs has come to…

You may have seen it already; I have had a few opportunities to watch it but didn’t, until now. SWAT team busts into a house, shoots two dogs in front of a kid who will remember this for the rest of her life or so, and probably fucked this guys’ life up beyond recognition – all for a little bit of pot.

I’m not going to argue that pot isn’t illegal, or that if the guy did have some pot he was breaking the law. However – this is like going quail hunting with a goddamn tank. How the fuck can you justify a SWAT team for a small amount of pot? Yes, I know, drug dealers can be dangerous and cops die from crossing them. When they’re on these raids the cops’ nerves are piano-wire tight, and sometimes shit happens. I get that, and most of the time, I support the cops.

But all of this for some weed? Really? In the Navy I was an ORM (Operational Risk Management) instructor for a while. I won’t bore you with the details of that – I could, and I kinda want to, but I won’t! – but one of the principles of ORM is “accept the risks only if the benefits outweigh the costs.” I can’t imagine how this raid went up the chain of command and they decided it was a good idea to go ahead with it so they could get some weed.

Yes, I also know about drug networks and trying to get information from the ground up in order to snare the big game. I just can’t imagine the ORM being ignored here.

Actually, I lie. I can actually imagine it fairly easily. The war on drugs is a machine, and in order to keep running – and justifying the money spent on it – that machine needs numbers, as in amount of drugs kept off the street, amount of busts made, etc. That’s how I can see this happening: any bust is a good bust.

There are a lot of people out there who claim to be against big government, but they’ll turn a blind eye to this or say it is justified as part of the war; sometimes, some healthy flesh has to be excised in order to kill the cancer. I’m not one of them. This is exactly the kind of big government and waste that I don’t want to see. This kind of shit scares me more than rising taxes, socialized medicine, or muslim terrorists. This is what needs to be stopped.